I finally get Midnights. I don’t just mean, “Oh, I thought this album was whatever when I first heard it, and now I really love it,” though I do mean that a little bit. I mean I get it get it. Like, I get how Taylor Swift concert tickets are as pricey as diamond rings. I get why people freak out about her every single move. I understand the compulsion to puzzle through complicated interpretations of each public missive. I get it because my relationship to this specific kind of average-white-girl pop music has fundamentally changed—not just with Taylor, but with Sabrina Carpenter, Gracie Abrams, Tate McRae, and the other women who appear on algorithmic playlists with titles like “Summer Hits” and “Mood Booster.” My embrace of this music helps to explain how I’m living through what is simultaneously the happiest and the scariest time of my life to date. I’m still figuring out what to do about it.
Earlier this year, I met a man and fell in love for the first time in my life. As I saw friends—primarily cishet friends—share that most human of feelings, I felt anxious about if it would ever happen for me, as if I was too cold or closed-off or broken to deserve someone who would hold my hand on the train home, or whatever. I think all trans women are subliminally told that there has to be something wrong with anyone who’s into them. Even though I’d spent the last several years carving out valuable friendships and a fulfilling day-to-day life, I don’t think I’d ever had a sexual encounter with a guy where I came away feeling like he even respected me. My experiences had made me really question—for the first time since I was about 14—if I even liked men at all.
But then, at the very end of my 20s, it all went right. He’s sweet and caring and smart and just the best. He likes the Chicago White Sox and Robert Caro and helping me understand how airplanes work. He takes all the things that I once thought were stupid little deficiencies I had to lug around with me—the size of my nose, the sound of my voice, my overall mix of intensity and nervousness and past damage—and makes me feel extraordinary for possessing them. I never second-guess myself when we’re together; it’s almost startling how natural everything I do feels. With him, I am learning about just how powerful and transformative a force love can be. I feel so lucky and delightfully bewildered by these previously undiscovered feelings zooming around inside of me. I’m amazed that I even have the capacity to fit them all without bursting.
A lot of pop music is made for that kind of happiness, but I’m still learning about its function. I was rarely exposed to the kind of hits that kids my age would have heard on TRL, and long before I locked into the fact that I was a trans girl, the music I labeled my “favorite” was all-male rock bands like Green Day or Weezer. While I succumbed to the campy glee of Carly Rae Jepsen and 1989 when I got to college, my consumption of these glittery productions used to be a little more controlled. It was an entertainer-and-audience relationship in the most detached sense. My primary punk-inflected picks delivered me loud, sweaty, often abrasive catharsis. Pop was a product on the side that I could try sometimes when I wanted something more simple or broadly acceptable, like a freeway exit filled with fast food chains. I appreciated it for what it was, but it didn’t mean anything to me.
Until lately. Until I started catching looks of myself in the big mirror at his place and thinking thoughts like Wow, that girl looking back is everything I’ve ever wanted to be. Something as simple, hot, and upbeat as “Diet Pepsi” works wonders when you’re feeling your best: “I like the way he's telling me / My ass looks good in these ripped blue jeans / My cheeks are red like cherries in the spring / Body's a work of art you'd die to see.” The way these songs—and these singers—are packaged is to make them accessible to millions of people who are likely very different from one another. They deliver ideas that might be a little vague at times, but strike a universal chord: the idea of wanting and being wanted. Embracing that can be hard when your psyche is a switchboard of defense mechanisms, or if you spent last fall watching TV ads about how disgusting and unreasonable it would be for someone with your body to demand health care. But now that I know someone who holds the key to what I really desire, in a way that transcends all the hateful bullshit, I feel like I can join these women on a higher plane of cute, breezy fun.
It’s a weird time to be happy. Concurrent with this bliss is a mix of fury and fear at the torture that my government is inflicting on immigrants, queer people, or anyone else the president decides doesn’t fit in his preferred vision of America. They’re locking people up under appalling conditions for criticizing a genocide or going to immigration hearings or for no reason at all. They’re taking away the health care of the most vulnerable among us. They want to eradicate the acknowledgement of gender-nonconformity from public life. Everyone with empathy feels this, but where the administration’s cruelty intersects most acutely with my own life is the fact that I’ve been actively out as queer or gay on some level since I was a freshman in high school. That’s more than half my life—and the more important of the two halves. Relative to trans women in prison, on Medicaid, or living off a green card, I don’t feel the same immediate danger in my life. The pressure I feel is more long-term worry—when are they going to make that push to take every trans person’s health care?—or hyperawareness of the indignities that prick us when the powerful are motivated to inflict humiliation with the might of the American bureaucracy. I have a plan for what I’ll do if my clinic shuts down. I try to calculate what it’ll take to support all the persecuted trans people looking for safety by moving to New York City. Sometimes I’ll read something awful, go fully numb, and feel my sedated pop-music self draining out of my body as I struggle to envision a future worth fighting for. Knowing their intent and seeing the pain they’ve already inflicted, it’s natural for a girl to look for reassurance that she’s going to be safe.
I’ve found that reassurance in my relationship, because the traditional heterosexual couple feels furthest from the edge of the proverbial cliff. I knew this, in theory, before this year—in fact, long before I could pass(ish?) as a cishet girl—but it’s still wild how much a tall masculine boyfriend is like camouflage. The most frictionless way to move in public, it seems, is in this kind of contrasting pairing. It doesn’t prompt stupid questions, or invite weird looks from strangers. It’s completely unremarkable to everyone I could possibly encounter, and it mutes the part of my brain that is primed to guard against unwanted stares or possible problems. That elderly Long Island-coded couple at the museum probably thinks we’re just like them; I don’t have to hold my breath. The safest way to be trans is to not seem trans at all, I tell myself. If I can erase those areas of shame, those signs of who I used to be, maybe the threat will go away.
That instinctive desire to run has led me to these beautiful, aspirational, common-denominator female singers who make music that by definition goes down pleasant and easy. Over the past several months, I’ve felt their work slowly merge with my identity. Their music is no longer just a party catalyst or buzz-inducing treat; it’s an increasingly critical part of what makes me who I am. I relish working on my laptop with Tate McRae’s So Close to What in the background. I seriously consider shelling out for Sabrina Carpenter’s Short N’ Sweet tour at Madison Square Garden, even though (I think) I’ve always preferred small clubs to bombastic arena shows. I hear a line like Swift’s “Isn't it just so pretty to think / All along there was some / Invisible string / Tying you to me?” and say to myself, “That’s so true.” I’m caught up in the fantasy of escapism that props up the whole genre—the way these songs target your pleasure centers so ruthlessly that they can convince your brain that every moment spent listening is endlessly special. Compelled by that excitement, I can feel myself burrowing deeper into the lifestyle marketed alongside this music, where I’m buying Selena Gomez’s lip gloss or Kylie Jenner’s skincare lotion, because I connect it with these other gorgeous A-listers who are making me feel so good.
For the record, I love my boyfriend as a very real and amazing person all his own, separate from anything the universe might project onto us. I love how he can make me crack up laughing just before I fall asleep, and the taste of the scrambled eggs he makes for me in the morning, and how romantic it is when we’re both just barely touching while reading next to each other on the train. In any year, under any administration, I would be hanging all over him while together and feverishly looking forward to seeing him while apart. At the same time, it feels like maybe—I’m speaking from inexperience here—some aspect of love comes from how the other person reflects back on us, and how they make us feel about our own inner personhood. My man makes me feel beautiful and normal, and even though I wish I could confidently condemn my ideas of “beautiful” and “normal” as problematic, I can’t help but cling to them, too. I’m listening to the music I associate with beautiful, normal girls to reinforce that enthusiasm at a vision of security, basking in a basic-straight-girl privilege which has held an impossible allure for so long. I let Dua Lipa, Kesha, or Olivia Rodrigo fill the room while I’m cooking, relaxing, or doing myself up for date night. I visualize the scene outside my body, swooning at how much I think I look like a girl who’s used to embodying this sort of thing—a girl who would only draw a double take because she and her boyfriend look so hot and in love.
Of course, everyone uses music to shape their identity—to feel more manly, righteous, goofy, or sensitive. American Idiot helped make me a place among the boys in fourth grade. In defining my queerness, I turned to artists like David Bowie, Placebo, and La Roux, finding in them models for a life (or at least an image) that I didn’t see anywhere around me in my suburban Midwestern hometown. Now—aided, frankly, by a streaming service that organizes itself by “vibes” and not the roulette dynamic of an iPod shuffle—I’ve become more in sync with the median American pop product, while my body and love life grow closer to the idealized image of a median American lifestyle. I’m smart enough to know that trying to blend in with a broken status quo is kind of dumb, but I’ve also never felt so confused and overwhelmed by the force of my own elation. It’s like there’s this bubble in my brain blocking out everything but my own physical and emotional response to being near him.
Last week, late at night when he was in the shower and I was in his bed, I had Taylor Swift’s “Lover” playing from my phone on the nightstand. It’s syrupy sweet and the kind of slow-dance ballad that I never much liked. And yet, in this new era of mine, I listened to the earnest romance of the lyrics while staring at the dimly lit ceiling and barely stopped myself from crying. Can I go where you go? / Can we always be this close forever and ever? I can logically lay out the path of our relationship in a way that makes sense, but the idea that I deserve this love, and that I was able to find it, feels so magical in large part because it runs so defiantly counter to every narrative that our enemies try to push about trans people. After a few minutes the song ended, and then he came back, and we cuddled, and I knew that for as long as I laid there I would stay untouchable.
Then the morning came. He woke up at 5 a.m. to get to work. I fell back asleep until 7:30 before taking the long pair of trains to my apartment. On my way, I felt my eyes reopening to horrible reality, the terror creeping back into my heart. I had Taylor in my ears, almost like a protective spell, keeping me focused on the ways in which I still am deliriously, ridiculously happy—her voice, at least for now, making me believe that I can escape.
